UC Berkeley slashes jobs

The hammer is falling at UC Berkeley, with word that the university is laying off 150 managers and support staff.

The news, which was delivered in a campus bulletin late Thursday, comes just days after Gov. Jerry Brown proposed slashing $500 million from the UC system next year.

The job cuts are on top of 600 positions that Cal has already eliminated since last year.

Campus officials say they got a jump on the problem last summer when they hired an outside consultant — at a cost of $7.5 million — to come up with recommendations for streamlining operations.

In an update message, the university’s Operational Excellence Executive Committee — a group of campus administrators that has been working with the consultants — said it expects to cut operations by $75 million in the next three years, with a big chunk of the savings coming from streamlined purchasing practices.

“The campus expects to eliminate approximately 280 full-time positions, half involuntarily and half through removal of vacant positions, retirements and voluntary separations, mostly before June 2011,” the committee said. “Although this is positive news for our cost savings effort, we are saddened to announce that nearly 150 staff on our campus will be laid off.”

About a quarter of the jobs pay more than $100,000, with benefits.

Officials say the layoffs will cut the number of managers on campus by about a third, but that the cuts represent a much smaller fraction of UC Berkeley’s total of 7,000 non-teaching employees.

None of the jobs being cut are faculty or campus police positions. Also untouched is the undergraduate student workforce.